Grave New World (Book 3): Dead Men Don't Skip

by S. P. Blackmore

  I stared at him. This was, no doubt, the fucker who got Keller all up in arms over us disturbing the peace. He was the reason Keller had come down to the medical facility—the reason we’d all wound up in jail, possibly due to be executed via the undead quite shortly.

  I will fucking kill you, I thought.

  He turned and walked quickly back inside. His front door shut hard, echoing across the street.

  Evie scampered back into the townhouse. I followed her in and was immediately hit by a pungent odor. Obviously no one had let her out during the night; she’d adopted a corner in the living room, judging by the stains on the floor.

  She saw me looking and wagged her tail slowly.

  “You look a bit sheepish,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ll clean it later. Do you want to go for a nice long walk?”

  She wagged her tail faster.

  Maybe I needed to become a dog person.

  She followed me upstairs and kept me company while I showered, changed, and scarfed down a lone granola bar. I gazed into our fridge, still full of leftover pastrami, and tried to hold back the rumbling groan in my stomach. At least the brig had real food. I’d be right back to eating this shit within the next five hours.

  Wait. No I wouldn’t. If I were going to attempt to stage a revolt that would probably end in me getting blown to pieces, I was going to eat something good beforehand. With that in mind, I went to the cupboard and dug out more of Tony’s canned soup. There was no sense dying on an empty stomach, or a stomach full of pastrami.

  After wolfing down the soup, I crouched down in front of Evie again, massaging her ears the way I’d seen Dax do from time to time. “What do you think about talking zombies?” I whispered.

  She licked my face, and I remembered why I hadn’t gotten all that into dogs. No matter how sweet they are, their breath stinks.

  I still had twenty minutes before I had to leave, so I ran a comb through my hair, then rummaged through my closet. The leather motorcycle jacket I’d found in Astra was still hanging there. It looked worse for wear—the apocalypse is tough on clothing—but it was in one piece, and it would keep me warm.

  I put it on, then clipped Evie’s leash to her collar. We stepped outside together.

  It all felt strange. Normal. Rows of neatly manicured houses, all of them varying editions of the same four designs. Dead grass in the yard. Picket fences. The perfect little neighborhood, even now.

  But there were no children playing outside. The colors seemed drab against the gray sky. The neighbors that I did see wandering around quickly averted their eyes. Maybe I had a terrible expression on my face; I tried to smooth it over, tried to smile.

  That made them look away faster.

  Evie seemed happy enough. She trotted along, her tail wagging wildly, a big smile on her face. Not for the first time, I wondered about her previous owners. What had happened to them? Had they died and she escaped, or had they set her loose, or…?

  Or did she eat them after they died? Is she going to turn into a zombie if…if…

  There are some things you just don’t need to know.

  We made it to Coup Headquarters, better known as Renati’s house on Candelabra Court, within twenty minutes. Evie kept looking for Dax and Tony, but settled for checking out my expression every now and then.

  Was she looking for reassurance? Did she feel the strange quiet in the air?

  I knocked on the door.

  A moment later Renati opened it. I almost didn’t recognize him without the lab coat; clad in jeans and an oversized flannel shirt, he looked like he belonged in some coffee shop in Seattle, or maybe a Nirvana video. “Good evening,” he said. “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

  I blinked at him. “Is it?”

  “Is not tomorrow the Ides of March?”

  I thought we were well past March, but I guess I could have been wrong. “Doc?” I asked.

  “O conspiracy, shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night—”

  “Can I come in? It’s cold.” If he was going to recite Shakespeare again, he could do it near a heater.

  Somewhat deflated, Renati stepped aside and let me inside. As soon as he spotted the dog, though, he all but squeaked in delight and crouched down to pet her. “You have a dog!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you had a dog!”

  “I didn’t know it was relevant. Would we not have given experimental drugs to people if you’d known about her?”

  He scowled at me, then went back to rubbing her ears. Evie wagged her tail hard enough to thump it against the wall.

  “What’s with the Ides of March?” I asked.

  “We should have had a password,” he said, straightening up and shutting the door. “And it should have been the Ides of March.”

  “There’s three of us, do we really need passwords?” I asked, looking around the house as Renati led me down a corridor and into what appeared to be a study. Bookcases stuffed with books and stacks of paper lined the walls, and heavy, albeit mismatched, wood furniture stood at odds with cozy red couches and a reclining chair. This place looked exactly the way I imagined Renati’s home: comfortable, and probably not updated since the early 1980s.

  “The good doctor is taking our little conspiracy group very seriously.” Logan was sprawled across one of the couches. He, too, had a flannel shirt and jeans on, and was playing a video game on his phone. Without the assault rifle and the fatigues, he lost a hell of a lot of the menace I’d come to associate with him.

  I tugged at my gray shirt. “Did I miss the memo about matching outfits? Should we get masks, too?”

  Evie tugged at the leash. I let go of it, and she wandered over to Renati, sniffed at his feet, and moved on to Logan.

  “So,” I said. “Is your house bugged? Because ours was.”

  Logan set his phone down and patted Evie’s head. “I had a buddy sweep the place. It’s clean. And my buddy’s CO said he only installed the surveillance stuff in your house right before Tony moved in. Wanted to keep an eye on you guys.”

  “This has always been my residence,” Renati said. “Keller’s got no need to suspect me of anything.”

  Man, Renati got to stay in his actual house after the end times? No wonder he seemed so well-adjusted. He could go home after work and bury himself in what looked like at least a full bookcase of varying editions of Shakespeare.

  “So how are we doing this?” I asked. “What are we doing? When is Saturday, anyway?”

  “Tomorrow,” they both said.

  Oh. Shit. That did not give us a lot of time to plan a coup, or an assassination, or whatever the hell we ended up doing. “So…you guys have something figured out, right?”

  The good doctor blinked solemnly at me. “We hoped you would.”

  It was a joke. Had to be. I could barely plan meals before the endtimes—arranging the systematic killing of a city’s military leadership seemed slightly out of my reach.

  I must have looked mortified, because Logan cracked a slight smile. “Yes, Vibeke, we have a plan.”

  “Such as it is,” Renati added. “It’s a very simple plan, in fact. Very difficult to screw up.”

  I looked at them expectantly.

  “We have a very gifted sharpshooter in our midst,” he said.

  When I stood there saying nothing, Logan cleared his throat until I shifted my attention to him.

  “You’ve seen me shoot,” he said.

  “I know,” I answered. “It’s a great idea. I’m just trying to imagine a reality where it works.”

  Evie wandered away from him and began sniffing the perimeter of the room.

  “I’ll be up in the stands,” he went on. “And I’ll—”

  “You think they’re just going to let you in there with your gun?” I rubbed Evie’s ears when she completed her circuit and rejoined me. “People were paranoid before the apocalypse. You couldn’t go into a concert or a ballgame without getting checked out. They’ll search you before you get inside, and that big rifle of y
ours is going to be one big no-no to them.”

  I contemplated covering Evie’s ears entirely. It just seemed wrong to talk about murder in front of a golden retriever.

  Logan thought that wrinkle over for about five seconds. “I’ll see if I can get up the back way,” he decided, “after the party’s started. People are already talking about how wild it’s going to be. Guards will be distracted. I should be able to sneak in with the rifle.”

  Sure. And pigs would fly. But it was clearly the only part of the plan they’d firmly worked out, so I moved on to my next issue with it: “What if you miss?”

  “I’ve never missed.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Evie sat down and thumped her tail against the floor.

  “In recent history,” he amended.

  “That’s the plan, then?” I asked. “We try to get you into the bleachers and you start shooting? That’s awful.”

  Renati held up a finger, indicating there was more. “You and I will be there. Lattimore refused to release more medical staff for the event. Can’t imagine why. The fighters have their own medical teams in the dugouts, but they’ll need someone outside, right by the court, so to speak.” He paused, then plunged on ahead: “I volunteered my services and said I would need a medic. That will be you. We’ll likely be right up against the, ah, playing field.”

  “You mean the murder field.”

  “Whatever. When the shooting starts, crowds will panic and scatter. We’ll go up to Keller’s group on the premise of helping the wounded—”

  “And kill the shit out of them,” I said. “Got it.”

  After a pause, I realized they didn’t have more to say. “That’s your big plan? Hope the sharpshooter gets him?” No answer, which meant yes, that was the big plan. I started pacing back and forth, and the dog got up and tried to follow me. “And then a doctor and a medic are the pinch-killers? This is a terrible plan.”

  Renati gestured for me to go on. “If you have something better in mind…”

  I didn’t. I had approximately zero ideas in that regard.

  Evie stuck her nose in my left hand and whimpered softly.

  How the hell are we going to help our friends if we don’t do something, puppy? I wondered. Keller will have them all slaughtered.

  Maybe we needed to slow down. To think about things. We could try sabotage, for instance. Maybe even kidnapping!

  Who was I kidding? There was no time for sabotage, or kidnapping, or thinking all this through. Keller was going to start killing the only people I still loved tomorrow. I—we—had to act. Now.

  I just wondered if I could do it.

  “It sounds like you guys have this planned out,” I said. “What did you need me for? Besides getting someone with a scalpel.”

  “The more bodies we have available, the better off we are.”

  By bodies he clearly meant able-bodied murderers, which I most certainly was not. But I went along with it: “What are you guys going to do if you pull it off?”

  Both men looked at me in surprise. “What?” Renati asked. “What do you mean?”

  “If you kill Keller and his followers. What next? Who’s in charge? Someone needs to run the city.” God, tell me it’s not one of them.

  Neither of them answered, which I took to mean they hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Let’s be blunt, this will probably end in our untimely deaths, but we should have some kind of contingency plan in case we get really, bizarrely lucky.”

  Renati lifted his hand and rubbed at the bristly stubble coming in along his chin. “Who is the first…ah…reasonable officer below him? One who could conceivably hold the city together in case of mass panic.”

  Logan scratched his head.

  “One who won’t arrest us.” I sat down next to him. The couch was every bit as comfortable as it looked. “I’m not going back to prison.”

  It didn’t make me sound scarier. Damn. My brain shifted gears, and something abruptly clicked back into place. We had a ranking military officer. Someone who could take charge. “Why can’t Durkee do it?”

  Their heads snapped toward me so fast I’m surprised they didn’t give themselves whiplash.

  “You been inhaling a little too much of that ash, Vibeke?” Logan asked. “Durkee’s dead. That’s why we’re in this mess.”

  “He’s alive. I saw him.”

  “Alive?” Logan’s voice went up a notch.

  “Explain,” Renati demanded.

  Evie placed her paw on the couch and stared at me beseechingly, as if she, too, wanted to know the story of Durkee. Damn, now I wished I had something more dramatic to share with them. “He’s in lockdown. We met him when Keller dragged us in.”

  “Are you sure he’s alive?” Logan asked. “Apparently dead people talk now.”

  “He said the same thing,” I said. “Seemed alive enough to me. He wasn’t killed, he was overthrown.”

  Renati drifted over to his bookcase of Shakespeare and stared at the titles, as though drawing some sort of inspiration from them. “That is a twist.”

  Logan reached out a hand toward the dog. She edged closer to him, her tail still wagging. “Shit. They kept that one on the down-low. Must’ve just been a few…”

  “His most trusted men,” Renati murmured. “Only his most trusted men. Five or six, maximum. Probably the same men we’ll be killing tomorrow.” He pulled a copy of Hamlet down from the top shelf and began paging through it.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for advice.”

  He paused on a page. “Odin had the Mead of Inspiration, and I have my books.”

  And I felt quite uncouth. All I had was…well, Dead Mennonite Walking. Hardly an inspirational read.

  “We’ll all meet at the medical facility tomorrow morning,” Renati said. He snapped Hamlet shut and set it back on its shelf, then glided over to a varnished wood bar in the opposite corner of the room. “Vibeke and I will need to gather our equipment, anyway. We do what we must and worry about the rest later. If we pull this off, somehow we’ll get word to Durkee.”

  How? When? What if we’re all killed?

  Silly question. If we were all killed, there’d be no story to tell, no captain to free. We’d just be dead and our problems would be over.

  Well, maybe not. Considering what had happened to Alyssa, death might end up being just the beginning of my problems.

  Renati poured three glasses of some sort of strong-scented liquor that came out of a fancy bottle, then glanced at Evie. “Does she drink?”

  “She’s the designated driver,” I said.

  He brought the glasses over, and sat on the couch opposite me and Logan. We each took a glass. I sniffed mine and almost sat back from the strength of it. I’d chased whiskey and tequila before; this stuff seemed more powerful, something rich men sipped as they concocted their next plan for a company takeover.

  The doctor next produced a leather-bound book. He held it out, and instructed us to put our hands on it to swear our oath.

  “Really?” I asked. “Aren’t we past this?”

  “It’s The Iliad,” he said. “We’re going to swear our oaths on The Iliad.”

  Logan shrugged. “At least it’s not King Lear.”

  Renati lifted his glass in the air. Logan and I followed suit. I could just see him digging through his mental files to find the perfect soliloquy, and I feared another barrage of Shakespeare.

  But then he shrugged, and decided brevity was the soul of wit.

  “Lady, gentleman, golden retriever.” He paused. “Here’s to committing the perfect crime.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Alyssa didn’t look too great in the light of the early morning. The overall lack of sunshine just highlighted the ashen color in her cheeks, and though she held herself somewhat better than the rest of the dead, you didn’t have to stand very close to her to realize something was off. Her face, with its unblinking eyes, moved too little, while the rest of her body moved a bit too much.


  She must have stared at me for a good couple of minutes after I spilled our entire sad little story to her. I don’t even know why I told her, really. Maybe I just wanted an impartial audience. Maybe I wanted to see if she really understood.

  “You want to remove Keller from power,” she said.

  “To save the city,” I said. “Not just for shits and giggles.”

  She focused on me. At least, I think she focused on me. She had almost no pupils; just tiny pinpricks of blackness set against the icy gray that came with being dead. “I’m dead, not stupid.”

  So her sense of humor had come back. That was good.

  What’s it like? I wanted to ask. I don’t know who told her she was dead, or if she had figured it out herself. But I held my tongue. It just seemed…insensitive.

  So I stood there staring at her.

  “You’ll do fine,” she said. “You’ve done hard time in prison. That will…help you.”

  She had probably meant that as sarcasm.

  “I’m really sorry,” I blurted out. “For this.”

  One side of her face twisted up into something vaguely resembling a smile. Okay, so motor control wasn’t exactly perfect yet. “Logan told me what happened,” she said. “Some of it. Not your fault.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She seemed to stare through me for a moment. Just looking at her made me uneasy.

  “Tired,” she said. “But otherwise I feel…fine?”

  Really? She didn’t seem entirely sure of it herself.

  “It’s complicated,” she allowed.

  “I’ll bet.” I would have freaked the hell out if I woke up and found out I was dead…or maybe I wouldn’t have. Alyssa seemed awfully relaxed about the entire situation. Maybe that was part of the…uh…transformation.

  “But why are you standing here? You have things to do,” she said to me. “Good luck.”

  “Where I’m going, I don’t need luck.”

  I sounded tough. According to Renati and his books, that was apparently the only thing that mattered.

  I stuck my fingers through the fence—something you should never do with a proper zombie, by the way—and said, “Be careful.”